The ChangingMinds Blog!

Pushed to the Edge: Would you kill someone?

I recently watched a show by mentalist/psychology personality Derren Brown,
called 'Pushed to the Edge' in which he gets ordinary people to kill other
people, by pushing them off a building. Of course nobody gets hurt, but the
person doing the pushing thinks they are committing murder and that this is the
only way out of being sent to prison. How did he get them to such a point? One
small step at a time. Make urgency more important than 'minor' legality.

It is very similar to ?The Heist? that he did a few years ago, in which he
replicated Milgram?s experiment (where the target was persuaded to electrocute
people) and got people to engage in an armed robbery. The bottom line is that we
are more compliant than we think we are, especially when we feel we are in a
corner and are being commanded by someone in
authority.

In the real world, people often get into crime through social pressure, and
may even end up killing others. A key step that criminals take is that they
justify such actions to themselves and are ready to do it again, often with the
approval and encouragement of others. This is the critical process of
criminalization, through which a person becomes comfortable with being a
criminal. A typical justification includes self-talk such as 'I had no other
choice' or 'He deserved it' as the criminals convince themselves they are good
and right, and that their victims and the police are the real bad guys.

Of course there?s a moral question to such shows, including what negative
effects it might have on the participants and even viewers. Against that is the
presented purpose, to warn viewers that they can be manipulated beyond where
they would think they could be pushed.